Our 6^th meeting was held on Tuesday 05.05.2020 on zoom. We came back to the subject of attention, this time focusing on temporal attention. Moran Aharoni led the discussion, which was focused on “Anticipated moments: temporal structure in attention” (Anna C. Nobre & Freek Van Ede, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2018). The review was focused on studies where subjects expect the appearance of a target at certain times during a trial. Several interesting topics were raised during the meeting. For instance, the question of intrinsic versus dedicated encoding of time by neurons. That is, is the encoding of intervals done by the same neurons that represent other aspects of the same stimuli, or are there neurons that specifically encode the duration of intervals? Furthermore, a question was raised around the distinction, if one can be made, between attention and prediction. On a related note, the differences in timing capabilities between the visual and auditory modalities was discussed. Many previous studies have shown the subjects are generally better at timing auditory compared to visual stimuli. However, is this a result of an innate difference between vision and audition, or can subjects be trained to perform similarly in both modalities?

A large part of the discussion focused on questions related to the performance benefit of entrainment, and the related notion of rhythmic/attentional sampling, which was also discussed in the 4^th meeting of the group.

Looking forward, an interesting topic for future discussion was the neurobiological basis of alpha oscillations. Alpha oscillations are obvious in EEG recordings and have been correlated to different cognitive functions using (mostly) M/EEG studies in humans, yet the question of what these oscillations represent in terms of neuronal activity remains open.

 

Participants

Nora Vreiler

Gal Vishne

Nir Ofir

Moran Aharoni

Carmel Auerbuch

Lorenzo Guarnieri